2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability

Join us for the opening night of the .

The 2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability brings together artists, scholars, and curators to discuss climate change within the arts and museum institutions.

How have artists navigated landscapes of extraction and ecologies of displacement? The practices represented on this panel consider environmental change within longer histories of colonialism, capitalism, and human effects on our physical environment. Looking at cultural systems and structures, they map the violence of enclosure and dispossession but also propose a renewal of ethical lifeways—paths to reparation, repatriation, and collective survival.

Panelists: Adam Khalil, Lan Tuazon, Sahar Qawasmi
Moderator: Mae-ling Lokko

Hear from artists utilizing social practice and activism to seek out solutions for our changing landscape. These panelists have created multiple artist-run initiatives as a method to work within their communities. This panel will dive deeper into how participatory collaborations can establish new solutions, and how we might find new pathways through dialogue.

Panelists: Lee Pivnik, Jen de los Reyes
Moderator: Janelle Knox-Hayes

Taking a closer look into collections, cultural production, and cultural sites, these artistic practitioners ask us to reconsider the possible. Disrupting default operating systems and pulling at the threads of sourcing and resource allocation, they will explore provenance research, conservation methods, and collection policies in this panel, as well as museum and artistic practices and how they impact global industries and our planet’s degradation.

Panelists: Amy Balkin, Beatrice Glow, Michael Wang
Moderator: Stefanie Hessler

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1974, Chicago, Illinois) is a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining human geography and the history of Black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with how space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies. Dyson has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what type of climates are born out of world-building.

Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont; and the Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Galleries, London. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Her work was also presented at the 13th Shanghai Biennale.

The Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art was established in memory of Max Wasserman (MIT Class of 1935), a founding member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. This public forum was endowed through the generosity of the late Jeanne Wasserman and addresses critical issues in contemporary art and culture through the participation of renowned scholars, artists, and arts professionals. The Forum is organized and presented by the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Bartos Theater, Ames Street, Cambridge, United States